Jon Lovett was a speech—and joke—writer for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. He’s now part of the team behind Crooked Media, a political-content startup that launched its first podcast, Pod Save America, after the election. Lovett quickly became Pod’s breakout star, injecting rapid-fire critiques of Trumpland with humor. And now he’s hosting the company’s most recent show, Lovett or Leave It. He told WIRED editor Maria Streshinsky about smoked salmon and the wisdom of Kellyanne Conway.
Whenever you’re talking about using humor in politics or in a policy speech or in a serious moment, you’re talking about using it as a tool to engage people. That’s why putting a joke in a political speech is a luxury, and it is always a risk. A boring speech can be just a boring speech. But a speech with a joke that falls flat is awful. I hate it. That’s why I think it’s easier to hate a comedy. If a drama doesn’t land, it’s boring; if a joke doesn’t land—you hate that.
When a joke works, it works. It can make a point in a really simple way; it can be a great little sound bite to put on television or share on social media. Humor has this incredible power in how we communicate about politics now, in part because there’s something natural in the way it’s communicated. The audience shares context, and we share frustration. The same things that are silly to you are silly to me. I think that’s why jokes are so effective, and that’s why it hurts when they don’t land, because it hurts to discover that two people don’t find the same thing funny, because it means in some way they don’t share the same sense of the world.
One thing lots of people have noticed that is troubling to the core: We’ve never seen Donald Trump laugh. What’s that about?
In this one State of the Union speech, we were talking about simplifying the government. Obama was talking about how complicated wildlife management could be. He said there is one department that handles the salmon in the freshwater, and another department handles them when they are in salt water. Then we added this joke—please brace yourself: “And I hear it gets more complicated once they’re smoked.”
Congress chuckled. There was a pause. Some light laughter, but the next day NPR looked at how the speech was portrayed in news headlines. They included the words jobs, economy, future, America, together—the classic words in a State of the Union. Then they asked people to say what they remembered and did a word cloud. The result was just a giant salmon in the center of the diagram. You would have thought that the president gave a State of the Union about salmon policy with some light references to education and war.
I don’t want to draw too many sweeping conclusions, but there is nothing wrong with sharing moments with like-minded people about how ridiculous and morally reprehensible the opposition is behaving. Shows like Full Frontal are awesome, they do good work. They give people relief in a crazy time—they reinforce for the people watching that things are absurd.
Blaming these shows for anything, which some people do sometimes, is ridiculous. The idea that there are people out there who would have gone and marched on Washington but instead stayed home to watch John Oliver—it’s just so stupid. Give me a break.
What we can’t forget, though, is that there are millions of people who aren’t watching those same comedians, and our shorthand isn’t necessarily the shorthand of people outside of this liberal consensus and culture.
One of the pitfalls that happened with the Clinton campaign, and Democrats in general, is that it wasn’t enough to acknowledge that what Donald Trump was doing was reprehensible: the way he talked about women, his critiques of Muslims, his conflicts of interest, his total disregard for the truth, his vulgarity, his disrespect for America as a society. Acknowledging it was step one. Step two is: And this is how it’s going to actually make your life worse.
Everything now has to be about step two. Kellyanne Conway is one of the most dishonest humans ever to grace the office she holds. But, and it’s hard for me to admit it, she has the simplest and smartest explanation for what we are talking about, which is: There is a difference between what offends you and what affects you. She is behaving terribly, but you know what, a broken clock is still right twice a day and all that.
We can laugh and we can make fun and we can fight and we can do it through jokes and through comedy, but it has to be about more than why people are reprehensible. It has to be more than the absurdity. It has to go that next step and tell people how this is actually going to damage people’s lives.
We don’t have a time machine to fix our problems. (At least I’m pretty sure we don’t have a time machine. If we did, we’d be using it to fix some problems right now. Send Comey an Edible Arrangement.) It’s hard not to be hyperbolic. We have to use every tool available, and comedy is one of them.
Jon Lovett (@jonlovett) hosts Pod Save America with a gaggle of former Obama staffers and Lovett or Leave It with himself.
Fake @POTUS tweets by Owen Ellickson (@onlxn).
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